On a chilly winter day Hall drives slowly into a pasture
on the outskirts of Point Reyes. Bellowing, jostling Black
Angus surround the pickup, their shining eyes and moist
dark muzzles pointed in her direction as attentively as any
pet’s. Hall puts the truck in low gear and hops out, letting
it chug unattended across the pasture while she climbs in
back and tosses pats of hay to the herd. These days, this is
how she spends most of her workday in the winter: moving
from pasture to pasture, feeding more than 300 pairs of
cows and calves.

Hall says her cattle are now prized for their genetics as wellas their meat. She, and her father before her, spent decadescarefully breeding a fine herd. “These aren’t just cows,” Hallsays. “There are tons of genetics stacked up in there.”Just a few miles south on Highway One, another clusterof seemingly identical bovines are scattered across a hill-side. This herd belongs to twogenerations of ranching women:Amanda Wisby and her 83-year-old mother, JoAnn Stewart.Today Wisby runs both the cat-tle and the family’s horse camp,but Stewart took the ranch overfrom her father in the early

1950s, when she was just 25.

“As far back as I can remem-ber, I wanted to be a rancher,”says Stewart. “I grew up feelingit doesn’t matter what your sex is, in terms of ability. Itcertainly hasn’t mattered for me — I ranched here for 50or 60 years.”Stewart got a degree from UC Davis, where she was oneof few women studying agriculture. “There was a saying thatthe women who went up there were after an Mrs. degree,” shesays, adding that even after leaving school she was aware ofbeing a minority in the profession. “My father said you can beanything you want to be, but you have to have an education. Iguess you could say I didn’t really give a damn about the restof the world. If you don’t like what I do — tough.”The key to her success, and later to her daughter’s suc-cess, has been adapting to change, Stewart reflects, and thejob of each generation is to help the farm keep up with thetimes: “You can’t survive by doing what was done in the past— you’ve got to go ahead.”

Opposite page: A barn on Stewart Ranch.
This page: Joanne Stewart and a horse
and cattle grazing on the ranch.